


Gray

by unorthodoxCreativity



Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Identity Issues, M/M, Masturbation, Self-Hatred
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-03
Updated: 2013-08-03
Packaged: 2017-12-22 06:09:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/909830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unorthodoxCreativity/pseuds/unorthodoxCreativity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rorschach despises when his world can't be split into black and white.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gray

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Livejournal, Dec. 30th, 2010.

His mask is his only possession he could not live without.  
  
It's much more than a mask: it's a face, his face, a wall keeping the horror of the outside world out, and the turmoil and grotesque voices roiling through him safely in.   
  
Black and white, shifting and changing like the sands of time and like the crumbling society around him. Black and white, distinct and separate and unyielding, evil and good, dark and light, no and yes.  
  
There is no gray.  
  
There  _should_  be no gray.  
  
But it's there.  
  
Hazing on the edges of his vision, threatening to encroach on his strict world view, biting at his peripherals like so many dull razor blades intent on carving off his sharp dedication, the gray is there.  
  
Once, a long time ago, he could ignore it. He could snort a bitter, humorless laugh at the colorless drifting blur, something that had always been cast away and replaced with incensed clarity the moment his flawed face was covered by his righteous one.  
  
He tries to tell himself he doesn't know what changed to let in that sense of doubt, but that would be a lie, and lies don't belong on the front of his brain or the tip of his tongue when he's being Rorschach. He's being Rorschach a lot more these days, even when the shifting mask is hidden beneath his mattress to keep a prying landlady from unneeded discovery. It's an attempt at pushing all the corruption, all of the Walter, from himself, a desperate attempt if he's being completely honest with himself – and a lack of complete honesty is just as bad as an outright lie, even if it's easier to rationalize – but still the gray clings, keeps him up with new introspective worries instead of the usual hatred and planning away the city's criminality that generally impedes on his sleep.   
  
He does know what changed.  
  
It's a large combination of things, and it's often hard to untangle and find the beginning of the slick ouroboros knot that constricts and monopolizes his brain. Sometimes it's impossible, on days where Rorschach says  _enough_  and constructs a wall of his own, an internal one, keeping his thoughts and Walter's separate, clinical and cold, just like the ever-present black and white. Those days are the days with less crime to fight, less to distract his senses and reflexes and split-second decision-making, the days his rapid-firing mind grasps at pondering himself and his own failures instead of the world's.  
  
The days that abuse him with more crime and more fighting than he could have wished for are the worst ones, seducing him with the false promise of easy sleep and dreams of justice. The night always falls swiftly, the gray chasing its tattered cloak and choking him, restricting the oxygen from his carefully-placed filter, black and white, during the day.  
  
Daniel.  
  
It always falls back to him. Him and the Roche case, so long ago now. He knows that was the departure, the moment his black and white shattered, brittle and hobbled back together by hands with new surgical precision, ignoring or perhaps blind to the gray that continues to bleed, hemorrhaging into his subconscious. Intent on drowning him in his own filth.  
  
 _Daniel._  
  
He knew, from the very first time he turned to the other, a kind face and kinder eyes trained on him already, open, so  _open_ and trusting despite all reasons not to trust – he knew it was a mistake. He knew working with this man, so different than him and yet, so very alike, would drive a wedge into his careful armor. Would give him weakness.  
  
What he hadn't been able to anticipate was how big a weakness it could fracture into. Daniel, it always leads back to him, every tearless, wretched sob under the cover of darkness his fault, and not his fault at all.  
  
Honesty reminds Rorschach – Walter – that this weakness is no fault but his own. Daniel is a good man, untainted by the dirty, clawing hand of the very evil he fights. Daniel can wash his hands, can shed his mask and his cape at the end of the day and become a man apart from that life of selfless war and corruption up to his ears. Rorschach can try, but still the gray will bleed. His hands can never be clean.  
  
Sometimes, the gray overwhelms him, fogging over his whole being until there's nothing but that sharp, stinging want that coils in his stomach when he thinks of Daniel without the safety of a simple monochrome vision. It only serves to pull his already constantly tense body tauter, to pulse blood that should be red but is only a disturbing and evil gray into places it shouldn't go. Sometimes he can ignore it despite everything, heave himself violently to sleep with viscerally raw sounds in his throat and comfortingly colorless tears, neither black nor white nor gray. His sleep then is dreamless, the joint relief of Rorschach and Walter combined pulling such a deep exhaustion from him that he wakes and sometimes forgets there was a time he was anything other than tired.  
  
Most of the time he can't ignore the pulse, and a sick, revolting perversion rises with the gray, triggering a frantic and helpless fury of self-hatred. His hands are already dirty, forever dirty, so it's without much consequence when he reaches low on himself, grasping, torturing the expected reaction from him like criminals with broken fingers. He finds no enjoyment in this, no relief, not like the cries from fallen men in bars who give him honesty in their pain. There's no purpose in these actions, no justification, and they only serve to fill him with shameful guilt at what he puts his only friend through. Daniel, unaware of his wicked thoughts, unaware that the only reason Rorschach fights so viciously against the slime in the streets is so he doesn't have to take his place among them.  
  
These hands, this mind, they can touch no one so long as they're stained with that betraying gray.


End file.
